Often in manufacturing, a newly manufactured computer machine is set to a generic date and time for each machine that is not intended to be accurate. For example, each unit may have 3 May 2003 assigned to the local real time clock on the motherboard of the machine. Alternatively, a rough approximation of the correct time is often used. For instance, many newly manufactured computer machines or systems created today have their local internal clock set to the current time in central standard time (CST), which results in computer systems created in Europe having a time 6-7 hours off when shipped from the manufacturing facility.
Incorrect timing information may cause problems during manufacturing for computer systems, such as preventing software from being installed correctly. For example, the Microsoft Windows XP® operating system may not work correctly with some dates that are provided by a local internal clock of a computer system. Further, some enterprise log in systems operate off of time stamps, and if a local clock of a computer machine is not within time parameters for that log-in to work, the computer machine will be unable to log a user on a computer network.
Additionally, for customer specials and builds for certain regions, the difference between time maintained on a computer system and the accurate time for the region may result in either a poor customer experience from an obviously invalid time, or additional manufacturing cost for large customers that require the correct time to be set on all computer systems, which currently needs to be done by hand. For many environments, such as corporations, that have many computer machines, it may be overly burdensome to set the date and time information for hundreds or thousands of machines, especially if a particular user of a machine is not capable or not authorized to set timing information himself or herself. For example, this may require one person to set the time and date information for all of these machines.
Standard methods of setting the unit time are insufficient for this task, since they either do not communicate time zone differences well or require custom configuration and large amounts of time to truly synchronize local timing information with a reference clock. For example, with some approaches require a computer machine to connect with an external server for timing information. This is a problem during manufacturing, however, since external network connections are typically not provided. After manufacturing and shipping to a consumer, this is also a problem because some customers have firewall security measures that prevent computer machines from connecting to external servers.
As mentioned previously, some approaches also take a long time to synchronize the time maintained on a computer machine with time maintained on a network server. For manufacturing, where it may take 2 hours (or less) to assemble a machine, this is problematic, since there is not enough time to synchronize the time maintained on a newly assembled machine with the time maintained on a network server.